Massey Lectures

The Massey Lectures are an annual five-part series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic given in Canada by a noted scholar. They were created in 1961 to honour Vincent Massey, Governor General of Canada. The purpose is to "enable distinguished authorities to communicate the results of original study on important subjects of contemporary interest." Some of the most famous Massey Lecturers have included Northrop Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Franklin, and Nobel laureates Martin Luther King, Jr., George Wald, Willy Brandt and Doris Lessing. In 2003 novelist Thomas King was the first person of aboriginal descent to be invited as a lecturer.

Contents

Sponsorship

The event is co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The lectures have been broadcast by the CBC Radio show Ideas since 1965. Before 2002, the lectures were recorded for broadcast in a CBC Radio studio in Toronto. In 1989. and after, a single public lecture was also given at the University of Toronto. Since 2002, the lectures were taken out of the studio with each of the five lectures being delivered and recorded for broadcast before an audience in a different Canadian city.

The lectures are broadcast each November on Ideas, and are published in book form by House of Anansi Press. Two consolidations of five older lectures have been published. Many of the lectures are also available in CD audio which can be purchased through the CBC. In 2011 most of the lectures were available on the Ideas website. Since 1997 the lectures have included some form of interaction through web forums.

Massey lecturers

1961 – Barbara Ward, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations

1962 – Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

1963 – Frank Underhill, The Image of Confederation

1964 – C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy

1965 – John Kenneth Galbraith, The Underdeveloped Country

1966 – Paul Goodman, The Moral Ambiguity of America

1967 – Martin Luther King, Jr., Conscience for Change

1968 – R. D. Laing, The Politics of the Family

1969 – George Grant, Time as History

1970 – George Wald, Therefore Choose Life

1971 – James Corry, The Power of the Law

1972 – Pierre Dansereau, Inscape and Landscape

1973 – Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom

1974 – George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute

1975 – J. Tuzo Wilson, Limits to Science

1976 – No Lecture

1977 – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning

1978 – Leslie Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic

1979 – Jane Jacobs, Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association

1980 – No Lecture

1981 – Willy Brandt, Dangers and Options: The Matter of World Survival

2016 – Jennifer Welsh, The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century

Notes

In October 2013, for Lawrence Hill's Massey Lectures, CBC Radio produced a visual narrative to accompany his topic of Blood: The Stuff of Life and published it on a website. This story is presented with huge, full-screen images of blood, animations which visually demonstrate historical attitudes and videos of people affected culturally by blood. The website elements are triggered by scrolling so that as the reader continues on the page, the multiple backgrounds seem to move at different speeds, creating a sensation of depth. This is known as a parallax website.

There was no lecture in 1996 because the Ideas producers and the selected Lecturer, Robert Theobald, could not agree on what constituted a sufficient manuscript for the lecture. The topic was to be on the broad theme of the future of work. Theobald later published his manuscript as Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium (1997).